I’ve been listening to Mark Winger’s series on Women in Ministry, and Egalitarianism vs. Complementarianism in general.

I think he does a great job of exploring carefully and thoroughly why egalitarianism is a factually and logically incorrect position as drawn from the Bible, and recommend it if you have the time and interest.

But I want to speak beyond that.

I think the egalitarians are not just wrong in their assertions, but wrong in what they want. The desire for equality, especially inasmuch as they really mean interchangeability, is profoundly wrong.

We Are Babies

The nature of eternity is such that you will never ever have lived more than a flat 0% of your life. No matter how long we live, we will still be children, only a fraction of what we will yet become.

Eternity is forever and always only just beginning.

But those of us who have not yet passed through the veil of death are especially young. Such time as we’ve lived, we’ve lived blind and ignorant of more than the barest fundamentals of reality.

Today, we tell children that they are unique and because of that uniqueness, special. But the simple truth is that in the context of this world, that’s a lie. Against billions of people alive today and billions more who have existed, with only 70 or so years to work in, you are not unique.

There’s someone out there with my name, working in my field, working in a similar sub field as me, a similar age, with a resume not quite the same as mine but reasonably close. I’m pretty sure I could pick up his job in a couple of months and he could perhaps do the same in reverse. This is not rhetorical speculation; I mean this literally. I just checked; his website is still up. Is he literally me? No, of course not, but this is just one guy I happen to have blundered across. If one were to rank people in the world by how similar they are to me, for all I know this guy wouldn’t even show up in the top 1000. I’m not that unique in this world today.

Few people are leaders in their field. Few people have unique skills. Few people have unique life experiences. Nobody has unique personalities. Most people are, frankly, interchangeable to a great degree. Not entirely. But significantly.

This is not an absolute fact of our existence, though. This is an artifact of our position on this current Earth, our immanent death and decay, and our lack of runway to develop our unique selves on this planet. About all we can do in this life that will matter in the end is orient towards Christ and help others do that too.

If you are Christian, by the time you have lived even a mere billion years¹, I expect you’ll be able to look around at your fellow Old Earth survivors and come to some dim understanding of what aspect of God you, and you alone, are created to expose. We talk about the simple ones like Strength and Truth and Justice, as befits our still-new understanding that God exists at all, but he’s got an infinite number of facets. You are uniquely designed to expose one of them. If this sounds limiting, it is not; you will need all of eternity to explore it. Even if God never says no to any interest you have, in eternity there is room for an infinite number of us to explore, cross paths, communicate and share and grow, and never ever be the same person, growing ever more unique until in quite short order when none of us would ever dream that we are anything but.

What does that all mean in practical terms?

I have no idea!

But I expect as time goes on that our differences will become more pronounced, not less, and the idea that we should be upset because somebody else has some right or responsibility we don’t will be ever-increasingly silly when we ourselves have our own unique sets of rights and responsibilities. We will all be happy with the ones we have and not desire someone else’s. Held together in eternal communion by the shared Ground Truth of the Lord God Almighty, we will be happy for their joy in their own being but not be willing to trade with them for anything as we will never be done being ourselves.

Diversity Is Our Strength

We tend to conceptualize evil in terms of harms to others. I think that is another artifact of us being so close in time to when the angels first turned evil. It may be that the true essence of evil is self destruction. Only in the relatively brief window during which a sinful being has not yet consumed themselves do they have enough residual goodness in their structure to even be able to hold themselves together enough to lash out at others before they are too consumed by their own hatred, pain, and lies to engage with an external world at all.

Mind you, I say “brief window” from the perspective of eternity. I have no idea how long our present crop of principalities and dominions etc. could keep this up, and I am grateful that God finds it good and proper to terminate their influence before that time naturally rolls around.

Satan has claimed the term “diversity” and turned into something I’m sure everyone reading this has a near-instinctive revulsion for, just as he has claimed the rainbow and given it to one of the very perversions that led to the Flood in the first place. But just as evil does not lead to freedom, evil does not and can not lead to diversity. I am hardly the first to observe that those who claim to support diversity in reality demand ideological lockstep that would do credit to any other cult. But while there is an element of signing one’s submission to the god of this world in that, I think this is also partially caused by the fact that evil is forever folding in on itself and constraining itself more and more.

Eventually, all evil collapses to what is essentially the same point; a being in agony, against itself, against everything in the universe, against all goodness, hating it all and living in eternal pain. Hell is described to us as being fiery and very unpleasant on its own terms, but even if God just locked all evil into their own solitary confinement, their own evil would still consume them in the end. The exact details of what lies the evil beings tell themselves and who or what they are most angry at might slightly differ, but on the eternal timeframe, all evil beings are essentially the same.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

By contrast, on the substrate of Truth and the Living God, there is no limit to the different sorts of beings that can be created, grow in the light, and become their own selves most fully. In infinity, with the Infinite God, there is an infinite amount of room for each and every infinite being. The diversity we will witness, and who knows, perhaps even participate in the creation of, is beyond anything we can describe in words.

If you are a Christian, if you follow Christ and accept his offer to usher you into this world… this is who you are. This is where you are going.

Against this… that God, in His Infinite Wisdom, has deemed that in these very strange circumstances that we live in, that you will not be an Elder in His Church, or that you will not be a carpenter because you don’t have the strength, or that you will never be a musician because you have no beat, or whatever other constraints you may currently be laboring under (of which certain specific gender-based differences are politically-hot topics but are otherwise not particularly special)… it is nothing. Treat it as such.

Time spent moaning about who you are not is time not spent finding out who you are and building who you will be.